Holiday Travel Tips from Science Fiction Novels

Send a copy of yourself instead
In Marina J. Lostetter’s Noumenon ,Earth finally has achieved the political stability and technology necessary to start interstellar exploration.
Resources are available for missions to twelve different stars. Those planning the trips want to send only the best and brightest. The only problem is, the best and brightest don’t all want to go on a voyage that will take generations—and the organizers of the expeditions have determined each convoy should have a crew of 60,000 to 100,000 to have a good chance of social stability and success. If a million scientists, engineers, and thinkers take off for the stars, where would that brain drain leave Earth?
The elegant but controversial solution:  send clones instead. It is not clear what role, if any, clones have on Earth society at the start of the voyage. But the way the experts who volunteer to be cloned talk is interesting. One wonders sending a clone on the expedition was “the wrong decision for his genetic material.” Another person asks him, “Mira is the ship where your genes will be spending most of their time. Isn’t it?”
Genes seem to be paramount, with cloned crew members being assigned task based on genetic analysis rather that the skills of the donor, or the interests of the crew members. And it is expected that all subsequent clones will follow in the same path as the first. Two members of a clone line are alive at the same time, the older a mentor and teacher for the younger.  Eventually the older clone “retires” (euthanasia) to make room for a new generation. Harsh, but the isolated, regimented society of a generation ship often is.
The novel follows one convoy of ships, named Noumenon, sent to explore LQ Pyx, a unique variable star that seems to defy the laws of physics. It might even be encased in an artificial structure. Even with the “sub-dimensional” drive, the journey will take a hundred years (a lot longer than most trips to grandmother’s house), while a thousand years will pass back of Earth. (Another travel trip— time dilation; you can leave your hated aunt’s home as soon as you get there!) What the crew of the Noumenon find at LQ Pyx, and later when they return to Earth, where by now 2,000 years have passed, is glorious science fiction. But for me, it is just as interesting how Lostetter explores the nature versus nurture question by way of generations of clones living in a restrictive environment.
So you could make a clone to go to the family holiday in your place. But what happens when the clone comes back? (The Noumenon crew didn’t have this problem, since their originals had been dead for centuries by the time they returned to Earth.) Would you have to share your clothes? Your spouse/partner might prefer the clone—after all, you’re the one who couldn’t be bothered to go visit the family. Maybe you should consider another way to make holiday travel easier.

Sleep through the whole trip while someone else drives
Six Wakes by Mur Lafferty takes place in a much more dystopian future than Noumenon. Those on the ship Dormire are not exploring, they are fleeing Earth, seeking a better life on a colony around another star.
Most are just passengers, passing the trip in cyro-sleep. Just six crew members are there to stay awake for the entire 400 year journey. And like the crew of Noumenon they are clones, but different in very significant ways. In Lafferty’s novel cloning is not used to create more individuals. In fact, that is forbidden by law. Instead it is a technique to extend the life of an individual. A mindmap can record the memories and consciousness of a person and implant them in another body. By law, the mindmap can only be implanted in a fully grown cloned body with the same DNA, unaltered in any way, after the original or previous clone has died. This allows individuals to chose to live very long lives, moving to new bodies as needed but retaining all their memories and skills. Six clones will spend their long lives as the crew for the centuries-long voyage on the Dormire, criminals who volunteered for the job to escape punishment for their crimes.
Six Wakes and Noumenon not only have very different types of clones, but also very different narrative structures. Lostetter’s story starts slowly, with a scientific presentation arguing for a trip to the star LQ Pyx, then builds chronologically through the preparation for the expedition and the journey of exploration and return.
Lafferty drops us in the deep end of the gene pool from the first page.
One of the clones wakes up in a new body with no memory of why, in a cloning bay where blood and dead bodies float weightless. She finds the rest of the crew are in the same situation—in new bodies, with no memories of the 25 years the ship has been underway. The captain’s previous iteration is not dead, but seriously injured, unconscious, and on life support. Not only has someone killed or seriously injured all the previous iterations of the crew, but the ship has been sabotaged and is off course.
Lafferty uses flashbacks, sometimes back much as 200 years, to tell the characters’ backstories and reveal the role clones have played in the history of Earth and the Moon. The main narrative takes place in just five days, as the crew tries to save the ship and solve a murder mystery where they are all victims and suspects.
Through all of this, the Dormire’s passengers rest peacefully. Cold and unknowing, but peaceful. So we can say sleeping through the whole trip can be a good way to go, as long as the driver isn’t murderous, or murdered.

Bring a friend
One way to make the trip a lot more interesting—install some technology with personality. Both Six Wakes and Noumenon have artificial intelligences to help run things—these AI become significant characters in their own right, and help save their respective ships. So pay no attention to Elon Musk—put some AI in your ride. Just don’t count on it to “Open the pod bay doors.”
Fastest isn’t always best
Of course, there’s always the option of not using a ship at all. In Stephen King’s memorable short story “The Jaunt” (collected in Skeleton Crew) you simply climb into a fantastic apparatus that instantaneously teleports you across light years and light years. We’ve heard mixed things though. Some say the trip takes a lot longer than you’d think.
What other life hacks can sci-fi offer?